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A Study of Saulos Klaus Chilima's Discursive Strategies, Malawi

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ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 500-509, May 2019 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0905.03 Projecting Voice in Political Discourse: A Study of Saulos Klaus Chilima’s Discursive Strategies, Malawi Wellman Kondowe Dept. of Languages & Literature, Mzuzu University, Malawi Flemmings Fishani Ngwira Dept. of Language and Communication Studies, University of Malawi, the Polytechnic, Malawi Abstract—The study takes a stance to explore the political discourse speech in Malawi as the country draws closer to the May 2019 general elections. This is a war-like zone period with different political figures pursuing, negotiating, and struggling for power. We specially mount our research to investigate how Saulos Klaus Chilima strategizes to get the winning card by exploring his voice and voice projection techniques during the launch of his party. We have hence borrowed insights from Heffer’s (2013, 2018) Voice Projection framework (VPF) and used Nvivo 11 Pro software in the analysis. The study discovers that his launch speech is highly authorizing, persuading, converging, and highlighting with very few instances of centring, and indexing which made the speech more powerful, stimulating and impressive. The study brings a different dimension of analyzing political discourse by shopping a theory from Forensic discourse. Index Terms—voice projection, political discourse, Saulos Klaus Chilima, accommodation, authority, discursive voicing I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Politics is the struggle for power; and language has become central as politicians pursue, enhance, negotiate, and struggle to achieve their goals. Every political action is prepared, accompanied, influenced and played by language (Horváth, 2009; Fairclough, 1995). But how exactly does language serve that purpose? And how actually do politicians use language to influence course of actions? An attempt to answer these questions eventually led to the emergent of a new field of political discourse analysis, a sub-field within Critical Discourse Analysis (van Dijk, 2006; Fairclough, 1995). Political Discourse Analysis deals with the reproduction of political power, power abuse and domination through discourse. In this study, we intend to investigate how politicians use language and other semiotic means in an attempt to have voice, to make themselves be understood by others; and their capacity to project their perspective effectively by using data from Malawi. It is noted that politicians are people’s representatives; hence, they arguably speak for their people (Kondowe, 2014a). Political speeches strengthen and renew the covenant between the people and their leaders. Be it inaugural address or campaign speech, politicians outline their perspectives and conduct that shape their people in the way they understand the system of their party or government at both theoretical and functional levels (Kondowe, 2014a). Therefore, the voice of politicians is taken as the voice of their people. The political voice embodied in their speeches and addresses can be seen to reflect the realities of their people. However, regardless that political discourse has provided rich data for researchers and scholars interested in discourse analysis, little attempts have been made to link the concept of voice and its impact on political speeches. The notion of voice projection is a metaphorical extension from the physical notion of actors throwing their voice out to their audience. If an actor succeeds in projecting their voice, their lines will be understood. If they succeed in projecting their metaphorical voice, their perspectives will be responsibly understood by the audience (Heffer, 2018b). In this study, we look at Saulos Klaus Chilima, Malawi’s political actor, on how he projected his metaphorical voices during the launch of his United Transformation Movement party by analyzing his first speech that threw him into the front line of politics. Saulos Klaus Chilima and his Transformation Movement Party Saulos Klaus Chilima became the Vice President of Malawi in June 2014 after contesting as a running mate for Arthur Peter Mutharika (APM) and won the May 2014 presidential elections under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ticket. Before joining politics, Saulos Klaus Chilima (henceforth “SKC”) held key leadership positions in companies like Unilever (1995-1998), Leasing and Finance Company (1998-2001), Coca-Cola (2002-2006) and Airtel Malawi (2008-2010; Malawi Voice, 2014), and became the first Malawian Chief Executive Officer for Airtel (Ngwira, 2014). He obtained his Ph.D in Knowledge Management from the University of Bolton in the United Kingdom in August, 2015. He obtained Master of Science (Economics) and Bachelor of Social Sciences (Economics) degrees both from the University of Malawi-Chancellor College in 2003 and 1994 respectively (Malawi Voice, 2014). As a student, he played a pivotal role in championing multi-party democracy when he was the president of Students Union at © 2019 ACADEMY PUBLICATION THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES 501 Chancellor College (SUCC). Besides the vice-presidency, SKC served as a minister for disaster relief and public events. He had also been a stern critic of corruption in politics (Nhlane, 2018) and the citizens’ blind loyalty towards their leaders, personalization of offices, victimization of others and nepotism (Malenga, 2018). As the nation drew closer to the May, 2019 tripartite elections, tension grew between APM and SKC in the party’s build-up towards the convention. Among others, it was noted that SKC was being sidelined in many government activities and was left out on some foreign trips and that the president was sending Minister of Foreign Affairs instead (Mpaka, 2016). Callista Mutharika, the former First Lady, was the first to come in the open to endorse SKC to be the DPP presidential touch-bearer at the expense of the incumbent APM (her brother-in-law), whom she said is aged. This worsened the working relationship between APM and SKC. This scenario seemed to repeat the history of bad blood between presidents and their Vice Presidents in Malawi. For example, President Elson Bakili Muluzi fell out with his Vice President, Justin Malewezi. Likewise, late Professor Bingu wa Mutharika also ran into conflicts with his Vice, Cassim Chilumpha just like Joyce Banda crossed her path with Khumbo Kachali as they went into May 2014 general elections (Mpaka, 2016). Therefore, the battle between APM and SKC camps were simply proving a curse running in Malawi political history. Political tables turned around on 6th June, 2018, when SKC held a press conference in Lilongwe where he openly declared his lack of interest to contest as a presidential candidate for the DPP. He also announced his departure from the DPP but that he would continue serving as the VP of Malawi until the end of his term in May 2019 (Kalungwe, 2018). On 21st July, 2018, SKC launched his United Transformation Movement (UTM) in Lilongwe which later became registered as the UTM Party in readiness for the May 2019 elections. In early February 2019, UTM went into negotiations to form an electoral alliance with former president Joyce Banda’s People’s Party (PP), however the deal did not yield any fruit as the two parties failed to agree on the choice of running mate which led to PP’s publicly withdrawal from the alliance (Kumbani, 2019). Therefore, when UTM party went to submit their presidential nomination papers to the Malawi Electoral Commission on 6th February, 2019, SKC revealed his running mate to be Dr. Michael Usi, the decision that received a mixed reaction and sparked a huge debate on social media (Kumbani, 2019). II. STUDIES ON POLITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS As defined by Fairclough (1995) and van Dijk (2006), political discourse analysis (PDA) is a subfield of critical discourse analysis (CDA). PDA deals with the reproduction of political power, power abuse and domination through discourse. Such analyses deal with the discursive conditions and consequences of social and political inequalities that result from such domination, and such analyses must also answer genuine and relevant political questions (van Dijk, 2006). Such a discourse is identified by its actors or authors who are in this case politicians. There is a vast bulk of data that has documented presidential rhetoric across the world especially in the USA where there is huge literature on the discourse of presidential aspirants, senators, and president-elects with Barack Obama holding the number one spot (Ye, 2010; Horvath, 2010; Wang, 2010; Shayegh & Nabifar, 2012). Furthermore, Horváth (2009) examined the persuasive strategies in Obama’s inaugural address using Fairclough's approaches, where he discovered that ideologically, the speech demonstrated pragmatism, liberalism, inclusiveness, acceptance of religious and ethnic diversity and unity. His speeches have also been looked from the point of Hallidayian Systematic Functional Grammar (Wang, 2010; Ye, 2010; Shayegh & Nabifar, 2012) by analyzing transitivity, mood, modality, and his choices of personal pronouns. Much has also been documented on the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Relative to this, Kayam (2017) worked on identifying the readability and simplicity of Trump’s speeches and debates, and it was discovered that unlike other candidates, he uses sentences and words that are shorter, less complex and can easily be understood even by 9-11 year-olds. Bonilla (2016) analysis also focused on the way the self/other-representation and mystification
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